Afterword: Why Big, Why Now?

If it need hardly be said that bigger is not always better, most would agree that less is not always more. The contributors to this timely volume recognize the truth of both propositions, and they remain sensitive to the challenges and potential shortcomings of critical inquiry when carried out exclusively in either register, big or small. But in the face of a widespread movement across the humanities and the social sciences to scale research up, these essays focus our attention on what the trend toward "Big Ideas" might betoken in a number of fields, including history, sociology, comparative and English literature, Victorian and cultural studies, and the digital humanities. Attendant to dangers, and of the need to maintain dialogue and dialectic between different scales of research, the essays register, nonetheless, what we might characterize as "Two Cheers for Big Ideas." They do so by making a varied, but collectively compelling, case for the urgency of putting big ideas to the service of big problems.

As Martin Jay reminds us in his witty and provocative reflections on the question of scale in intellectual history, attempts to trace the fate of "big ideas" over broad expanses of space and time are hardly without precedent. Indeed, the history of ideas as it took shape as a discipline in the first half of the last century was originally capacious, as spirited recent interventions like David Armitage's "What's the Big Idea? Intellectual History and the Longue Durée" are quick to recall.¹ Armitage, as his title alone makes clear, invokes another precedent, Fernand Braudel's celebrated call, first uttered in 1958, to conduct historical inquiry over the longue durée, spurning the history of discrete events in favor of the analysis of enduring structures.² That impulse toward examining serial and structural continuities had analogues in (or took inspiration from) other fields, such as structural anthropology and structural linguistics, and it was echoed in certain forms of literary inquiry as well.

And yet, as Jay also insists, the urge to study Big Ideas has frequently met with a questioning and indignant "Hey!" That loud call could be heard across the humanities during the 1970s and 80s as the structural imperative gave way to poststructural questioning, as the study of the history of ideas ceded its place to the history of ideas in context and to a Koselleckian-inspired history of concepts, and as social historians and new historicists made room for cultural history and elaborated methods to study the micro, the particular, and the everyday. Indeed, as Caroline Levine points out here in her sharp analysis, "a skepticism about generalization might even have come to constitute the most basic mission of the humanities" over the last several decades. That imperative, she points out wryly, generated its own form of generalization, from Fredric Jameson's "Always historicize!" to Eve Sedgwick's "People are [always] different from each other" to the position of Jan Parker, cited by Levine: "Particularise … that is what the humanities do."³ In this vision, to attend to the local, the resistant, the exceptional, and the specific is to guard against flattening generalizations. And although the particular can certainly pack a punch, it tends to stand in opposition to ideational economies of scale. In short, there was not much room in this vision for "big" ideas as conceived across broad swathes of time, space, or archive.

Of course, research is always to some extent a negotiation between the general and the particular, the macro and the micro, the big and the small. The current turn back to the big, then, may be seen in some measure as simply a natural oscillation, a corrective to research trends that were themselves a reaction against earlier expansive tendencies. And yet there is clearly more to the current turn to engagement with big ideas than simply scholarly fluctuation and fashion. In the first place, the increasing pace and consciousness of globalization have made thinking on a wider scale of space, at least, a scholarly imperative. Consciousness of planetary forces and problems, such as environmental destruction, species extinction, and global warming, have...